Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Tunelab on a cell phone?

I want to run Tunelab on a cell phone. It´s a LG KS20 with touchscreen. It comes with Windows Mobile 6.0 and has a 2.8´´ TFT touchscreen (QVGA 240 x 320). Apparently it´s not available in North America, but in Germany:

http://de.lge.com/products/model/detail/mobiltelefone_lgks20.jhtml#

Would tunelab run with that phone? In general, does a cheap microphone in a cell phone work for Tunelab? Anything else I should know about using Tunelab on a cell phone?

Gregor

A friend of mine runs tunelab on his cell phone although it is not that particular model. I suspect it will run on most phones that have the proper OS installed. As far as the microphone is concerned it can't be any worse than the microphones installed in most PDA's that people run Tunelab Pocket on. In fact I suspect that a cell phone mic is probably better.

Have you contacted Robert Scott? He posts in this forum, and this email is listed in the tunelab website: info@tunelab-world.com

I have Tunelab on a Samsung Blackjack. My guess is it will run on the phone you show, since it's OS is Windows Mobile 6, but that is only a guess.

It should run on any phone that uses Windows Mobile. I run it on my Blackjack as well. Before that I was running it on a Cingular 3125 with Windows Mobile 5 and it ran great.

Download the demo and try it on your phone. In TuneLab, there's a graph to see if the cellphones microphone can detect all the partials.

Yes, that´s what I will try tomorow. I will give feedback then.

Gregor

Today I installed Tunelab to that LG phone. Does not work properly! One problem: after opening the tuning curve the audio input is gone. I.e. when I close the tuning curve window no audio signal arrives. The only solution is to switch off and on again the whole phone (= soft reset). Bad.

Another problem: I didn´t change anything in the tuning curve settings (set to automatic). Then I tuned the temperament octave and the result was awful. The octave A4-A3 was to wide and other intervalls were bad, too. Then I changed from 6:3 to 4:2 and A4-A3 was much better, but the whole temperament was still very poor (as measured with Verituner and my ears as well). But it was my first attempt to tune with Tunelab and it might be that I did it wrong.

The phone has no microphone booster and no automatic gain control. Therefore in the windows menue there is no button for AUDIO settings. My guess is, that phones without that AGC don´t work with Tunelab. Can anybody confirm that?

Gregor

The phone might be overloading the input and thus getting a bad reading. Hard to know.

If you know someone else with a Windows Mobile based cell, maybe you could try the software on that phone.

This sounds like a hardware fault. The audio input should always be active (unless you switch to generating tones).

What tuning file were you using? One of the packaged files that comes with TuneLab? Or did you make a custom one?

6:3 in the bass gives a very conservative stretch. 4:2 gives an even smaller stretch. If 6:3 in the bass gave you too much stretch, then it is likely you were using some bad inharmonicity readings. You can diagnose many such problems by looking at the tuning curve and seeing what the offset is at A0 and C8.

But from what you have said about the audio stopping, it is questionable whether you have a working system. If the audio input is stopping, then I would not trust any other result that came from that phone until I had verified it with more primitive operations.

There is nothing inherently wrong with phones without AGC. Just watch the volume indicator in TuneLab to check that it is not overloading. You should be able to get proper operation with volume levels between 20% and 99% of full scale.

Robert Scott
TuneLab

Robert, thank you for the information. I used my own tuning file after measuring the inharmonicity data. And there was the first questionable thing: on some measured notes Tunelab told me that the IH data is very small for a piano and that I should try it again. That data in doubt was around 0.09 or so. A new measurement showed 0.8 or so. I made several tries and the data was not reliable. Sometimes 0.09, sometimes 0.8. I guess Tunelab just doesn´t work on that phone. What a pitty, it´s a really nice phone and a good value for money, but I need it for Tunelab only. So, I will look for another phone.

In the meantime I will install Tunelab on my HP pda and try a little bit around to get used to Tunelab. And I will carefully read the manual before

BTW, I installed the German demo version. First I thought it could be a demo problem or that something is wrong with the German version. But Wolfgang, the German retailer, told me that it should be identical to the English full version.

This is typical of overload distortion due to a volume level that is too high. Try playing the notes softly so that the volume level never reaches 100%. Or find a way to turn down the microphone volume in the Settings of the phone. Or get a different phone, as you said. And Wolfgang is right. The German version is identical to the English version, except for the language.

Robert Scott
TuneLab

Next attempt: has anybody out there the HTC Touch Dual Smartphone and runs Tunelab on it? Could get it for small money and I am wondering if Tunelab runs properly on that phone.

Gregor

Just to give feedback to potential buyers: Tunelab runs properly on the HTC Touch and it has automatic gain control. No problems until now. The LG KS20 does not work.

Gregor

Any chance of getting tuning software for my Android phone (T-Mobile G1 to be specific) that's good enough for me to dump my SAT III?